John Glover's hard-edged, slightly sinister voice (familiar to fans of television's Smallville) sustains Preston and Child's entertaining but slight thriller. In this installment, Gideon Crew, whom Glover imbues with more depth and humanity than the text itself suggests, is seeking revenge for the murder of his father, an Army intelligence officer. But he's interrupted in his mission, conscripted by a clandestine agency to perform a near-suicidal task: to steal the plans for a Chinese WMD. Crew exhibits extreme versatility in accomplishing his task, for when it comes to an impossible mission successfully performed, a better example is the way Glover adds dimension to the novel's cardboard characters and vitality to its overly long backstory. A Grand Central hardcover. (Mar.)